A Little Experiment
by Fortune Maiden
Summary: Xehanort has been defeated and all is right with the world again. Ienzo and Lea still have some lingering questions though...


**A Little Experiment**

_Xehanort has been defeated and all is right with the world again. _

_Ienzo and Lea still have some lingering questions though..._

* * *

In hindsight, he probably should have listened to Mickey Mouse.

Granted, that probably went without saying. One didn't get to be a King, Keyblade Master, apprentice to the great Yen Sid, yada, yada, yada, without knowing a thing or two, and, really, they were called Corridors of _Darkness, _and the balance of light and dark was all well and good, but, even without the mouse's warning he had enough of his own experience to know that nothing ever good came out of dealings with darkness.

The mouse said using the corridors was dangerous, and he'd been right.

"Ow!" Lea hissed, drawing his body back.

"Sorry?" his jailer frowned. "…Did that hurt?"

"…No," Lea admitted bitterly after a moment. "Your hands are cold."

"Oh," Ienzo replied, then opened and closed his mouth a bit as if unsure of how to reply (for once). "I can turn the heat up if you'd like."

"Forget it." Ienzo's hands weren't even that cold, and the room's temperature was fine. Lea just wanted to complain. "Just get on with it."

"Certainly!" His smile returned, and again Lea felt that unease. The one that told him to walk everywhere from now on.

"I'll only be another minute," Ienzo said, though he'd said the same thing about a minute ago. Lea wished he'd at least talk about what he was doing. He rather liked the new chatty Ienzo, though it seemed the brat still slipped back into his old quiet self when he was working.

Lea had tried to fill the silence himself earlier, but all that accomplished was dragging Ienzo into a conversation when he could have been hooking up…whatever he was hooking up now. It looked vaguely like a heart monitor, only with far more knobs and dials than ought to be appropriate.

So all that was left was to hum to himself and not think about how much his out-of-reach foot itched.

He could think about the wires and monitors and how he was going to get home after this instead. Corridors of Darkness may have been convenient, but they were the ones that got him into this mess.

Maybe it was time he learned to pilot a Gummi Ship…

"So, do the others know about your little experiment?" Lea found himself asking instead, with just a note of criticism in his voice. Not that he particularly cared to have more of them down here, though he would have loved to ask them why the underground lab was still around, and somewhat functional. All Ienzo said was they had to store the equipment somewhere.

(And that was probably close enough to the truth. Aside from this one room being in weirdly pristine condition, the rest of the rooms they passed were loaded up with dust and boxes.)

"Master Ansem is out on business with Aeleus, and Even and I had a minor disagreement."

A minor disagreement. That could have meant anything from it happened an hour ago and will be forgotten about by dinnertime, or they haven't spoken to each other for the last two weeks now. Lea rolled his eyes—

"Dilan's standing guard."

-and immediately sat up, uncaring that the action sent several carefully placed electrodes to the ground.

"_What?_"

Ienzo did care about the fallen electrodes and gave Lea a sour look.

"You never know what can happen down here."

"Like hell I don't! You said this was all perfectly safe," Lea snapped and crossed his arms, sending a few more probes tumbling. "You didn't tell them, did you?"

"Given the rarity of your visits, there wasn't ample opportunity so—

"Answer the question."

"No," Ienzo answered calmly. "But I don't think they'd be too opposed to it. I'm not doing anything wrong." He paused as though to come up with some evidence of no-wrongdoing. "You consented."

He did. Lea couldn't really argue with that. He wasn't sure how much he consented to lying on a cold table without his shirt and a bunch of things hooked up to him, but it was probably too late to point that out now.

"I guess that _is _an improvement over how things used to run down here," Lea remarked pointedly and laid back down on the table as Ienzo gathered up the fallen equipment and stuck them back into place (a little less gently this time). It wasn't like Lea wasn't somewhat curious about this as well. He just would have preferred a little less secrecy and a little more "and this is what this doohickey does" (if he could ever picture Ienzo saying "doohickey").

"Why do you want to know so much anyway?" Lea asked as Ienzo sat down at the computer and the screen came to life. Lea saw his name in the corner of one window, but Ienzo scrolled through things so fast, that there wasn't ample time to read anything else.

"I dislike unanswered questions. Don't you?"

"I suppose. But honestly things have gotten way too complicated for their own good. Remember "Nobodies do not have hearts"? Those were good times. Simple times."

"And incorrect times," Ienzo retorted. "I'm a scholar. I won't let things stand this way."

"What do you think you'll find then?"

Ienzo didn't answer. After a moment, he muttered something under his breath, and it took Lea a moment to realize he was talking to himself as he read through the different screens.

"Well I think you'll find a whole lot of nothing," Lea said. "So I can still use my old powers. So what? Roxas and Xion can do that too. Granted, they've always been a little special, sure, but it's probably still a coincidence either way. Or one of those believe in yourself kind of deals. I bet you just need to try a little harder and you'll get yours back in no time."

He'd given that advice to Isa before, though it hadn't really worked. In Isa's case however, he actively tried to distance himself from his Nobody history, so Lea could understand him having reservations and mentally blocking himself. But with how gung-ho Ienzo was about finding out where his powers went, Lea was sure he could do it.

"Or maybe it's one of those cases where it works until logic catches up to you. I mean I really didn't consider that I _didn't _have my powers anymore when I first tried them. You brainiac types just probably screwed yourself out of them by thinking about it."

"We witnessed you using them before trying ourselves," Ienzo muttered to him. He stopped typing and just read through the words and charts on the screen with hands folded in front of his mouth. Then he turned to the heart-monitor looking machine, and started fiddling with the dials.

That was a fair point. As it stood, out of the former Organization only he, Demyx, Roxas, and Xion were confirmed to retain their old powers, and the latter three were either still Nobodies or Replicas. The powers (especially the Corridors of Darkness) were convenient, so anyone would have wanted them if that was an option.

"Power comes from the heart," Ienzo said. "Does it not stand to reason then that it is also _tied _to the heart? That is my hypothesis anyway."

"Aren't a lot of things allegedly tied to the heart? Things like identity and memory and willpower and a bunch of other malarkey that being a Nobody disproved?"

"Perhaps," Ienzo agreed. "But if Nobodies can have hearts after all, and if these are new hearts, not the ones that were lost in the transformation, do those become tied to the Nobody's being? And what happens to those upon recompletion?"

Lea frowned. "I don't follow." Or at least, he didn't want to follow. Ienzo was going to tell anyway.

"Dilan caught me up on what happened in the Organization while I was dead," Ienzo said as casually as he'd talk about a book he was reading. "Among us regular Nobodies, you were the only one to begin questioning your role and changing as a result of your friendship with Roxas and Xion. You became irrational and emotional, the very qualities we'd sought to eliminate from ourselves all those years ago. If Nobodies really _can _have hearts, then that may well have been evidence that you'd gained one."

"Uh-huh…"

"So what happened to that heart?" Ienzo turned, an eerily calm smile on his face. It was the kind of smile Zexion wore when he'd figured something out and was smugly waiting for the rest of them to catch up. "What is Axel's heart never disappeared?"

Now Lea was following.

"Okay, so it remained, and my old powers are tied to it," he said. "I can buy that. But what about my old heart—_Lea's _heart. Don't tell me it never came back!"

"Why not? Ours did."

"But, then…" Lea shook his head as frantically as the wiring allowed. "That's crazy. You're crazy."

"That's what Even said," Ienzo remarked. "But the computer says _this_."

He clicked something and all but one window disappeared. The one that remained stretched across the screen and showed an outline of Lea (Lea knew it was him by the hair) with arrows coming out of him point to hearts.

Two of them.

"No way," Lea sputtered. "No freaking way."

"Way," Ienzo said, with his arms crossed triumphantly.

"You're saying I have two hearts in me right now? How does—How does that even _work_?"

Ienzo shrugged. He always was more interested in proving his hypothesis than following through on the "whys" of it. That was Even's job.

"Hey, this is weird, isn't it? Am I weird?"

"Weren't you always?" Ienzo said and admired the screen. This had been what he'd wanted to see, Lea knew. He'd been annoyingly vague when he'd approached Lea asking to experiment on him (in those exact words), only insisting that he had a theory on why Lea could still open the corridors and following up on it would be in both of their interests. He'd made a very persuasive argument.

"So who even am I then? Axel? Lea?"

"Does it matter?" Ienzo asked. "You're you."

Comforting, but that wasn't an answer.

"Sora carried around a bunch of hearts for a time, didn't he? How many did he get up to? Three?"

"Four."

"So is it kinda like that?"

"I suppose," Ienzo mused. Something about _that _question interested him at least. "Though in his case those hearts belonged people who had their own established identities independent of him. I don't suppose you consider Lea and Axel to be different people?"

"Not really," Lea agreed, though he wondered what it would have been like if Roxas _had _had all of Sora's memories when he came into existence, like the rest of them. Axel had been who he was because of Lea. The current Lea was who he was because of Axel. The name was really the only difference.

But still, how did this _work_?

"So what now then?" Lea asked. "I have two hearts. One of them is apparently letting me use all my old powers. It's beyond freaky. Anything I should worry about?"

"Probably not," Ienzo said with a dismissive wave of his hand. "Sora was fine after all. This really is so fascinating though…"

"I'm sure." It was easy for him to say. He wasn't the one with two hearts. He was the one who was going to come up with all sorts of crazy ideas that Lea would be badgered into cooperating with.

A thought came to him.

"So if I have a spare heart, does that mean you can do that thing you did with Roxas and Naminé and the replica body? Can there be two of me?"

"That's a frightening thought," Ienzo remarked dryly, though with just enough levity in his voice to suggest he wasn't too opposed to the idea. Once a mad scientist, Lea supposed and decided not to push it. He wouldn't even know how to begin explaining to Isa, Xion, and Roxas if two of him suddenly came home. The universe wasn't ready for such insanity. It was still recovering.

Then another thought came to him.

"Oh hey, if I have two hearts, do you think I can also have two Keyblades?"

_~end~_

* * *

**A/N**: Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed! Feedback is always greatly loved.

So... yeah... in the lengthy gap between Dream Drop Distance and KH3, I always headcanoned that all of the ex-Nobodies kept their powers because, well, Axel did. We see him opening corridors and tossing chakrams around so I was pretty surprised when Ienzo revealed that none of them have their abilities anymore haha.

And this was pretty much one of the explanations I came up with for myself and I'm attached to it. This is Kingdom Hearts so I don't think this is all that out there at all...

Mostly I just wanted to write more Ienzo and Lea. I like the idea of them hanging out and having some sort of amicable relationship.

Anyway, until next time :)


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